Kamala and Amala, the Wolf Girls of Midnapore

Kamala and Amala are two of the most interesting cases of feral children. The wolf girls were about 18 months (Amala) and eight years old (Kamala) when they were found together in a wolves' den. However, it is believed that they were not sisters, but were abandoned — or taken by wolves — some years apart.

Scroll down for the story of Kamala and Amala. Many books about feral children include the story of the two wolf girls. Newton's book Savage Girls and Wild Boys includes a chapter on Kamala and Amala and other Indian wolf children, and reveals how, throughout their short and sad lives, like so many other feral children — from Henri of 1344 onwards — they longed to return to their home in the wild.

Singh's diaries

You can read Singh's detailed diaries about the girls here, which were subsequently published as Wolf Children and Feral Man by Singh and Zingg.

Other books featuring Kamala and Amala

Other books to feature the girls include The Wolf Children: Fact or Fantasy? and Wolf Child and Human Child, while, for children, there's The Wolf Girls: An Unsolved Mystery from History. A useful journal article is Kamala of Midnapore and Arnold Gesell's Wolf Child and Human Child: Reconciling the Extraordinary and the Normal.

What a Word Can Hold — a poem about Kamala and Amala

Many thanks to Erin Noteboom for kind permission to reproduce her poem What a Word Can Hold.

Wolf Children and the Bifold Mind

This is an extract from a chapter of The Myth of Irrationality, by John McCrone

In 1920, however, a case came to light that was too well documented to be dismissed so simply. In that year, Reverend Joseph Singh, a missionary in charge of an orphanage in Northern India, heard of two ghostly spirit figures seen accompanying a band of wolves near Midnapore in the Bengal jungle. The local villagers were fearful of these apparitions but local custom forbid them to do any harm to the wolves. Intrigued, Singh built a hide in a tree top over-looking the lair of the wolf pack, an old ten-foot high termite mound that had become hollowed out with time. As the moon rose, Singh saw the wolves come out one by one. Then sticking their heads out briefly to sniff the night air before bounding forwards into the clearing came two hunched and horrible figures. As Singh described the "ghosts" in his diary, they were: "Hideous looking...hand, foot and body like a human being; but the head was a big ball of something covering the shoulders and the upper portion of the bust…Their eyes were bright and piercing, unlike human eyes…Both of them ran on all fours."

Singh returned some days later with a large hunting party to dig the creatures out. In his journal, he says that as the first pick-axe blows landed on the termite mound, the she-wolf came rushing out, baring her fangs and barring the way. She had to be shot dead with a volley of arrows. The hunting party then broke into the lair and hauled out the two human children, along with two wolf cubs. The children turned out to be two girls, aged about three and five. Their ghastly appearance came from the mass of matted hair on their heads and their hunched four legged gait. Otherwise they appeared lithe and healthy. Surprisingly, the two appeared not to be sisters but girls taken at separate times - further evidence of some distorted maternal instinct in the mother wolf. When no-one in the local villages came forward to claim the girls, Singh took them back to his orphanage, christening the elder one, Kamala, and the younger, Amala.

Singh knew nothing of the stories of other feral children such as Victor and the Hessian wolf-boys, but his description of Kamala and Amala were strikingly similar. The girls seemed to have no trace of humanness in the way they acted and thought. It was as if they had the minds of wolves. They tore off any clothes put on them and would only eat raw meat. They slept curled up together in a tight ball and growled and twitched in their sleep. They only came awake after the moon rose and howled to be let free again. They had spent so long on all fours that their tendons and joints had shortened to the point where it was impossible for them to straighten their legs and even attempt to walk upright. They never smiled or showed any interest in human company. The only emotion that crossed their faces was fear. Even their senses had become wolf-like. Singh claimed their eyes were supernaturally sharp at night and would glow in the dark like a cat's. They could smell a lump of meat right across the orphanage's three acre yard. Their hearing was also sharp - except, like Victor, the voice of humans seemed strangely inaudible to their ears.

A poor but relatively well educated man, Singh did his best to rehabilitate his charges. Influenced by the horticultural model of child development, he theorised that the wolf habits acquired by Kamala and Amala had somehow blocked the free expression of their innate human characteristics. Singh felt it was his job (not least, for religious reasons) to wean the girls from their lupine ways and so allow their buried humanity to emerge. Unhappily, before his experiment had progressed far, the younger girl, Amala, sickened and died. This proved a great set-back to Kamala, who had only just started to lose her fear of other humans and her orphanage surroundings. Kamala went into a prolonged mourning and for a while, Singh feared for her life as well. But eventually Kamala recovered and Singh started a patient programme of rehabilitation.

First, as Itard did with Victor, Singh had to socialise Kamala. Through a combination of massage to loosen the limbs and the dangling of food just out of reach, Singh coaxed Kamala into standing and walking. She never learnt to walk smoothly and would often revert to all fours, especially if she wanted to run, however Singh saw this as literally the first step towards getting her to "shake off" her wolf-like habits. Gradually, Singh trained Kamala to accept other human ways, teaching her to eat normal food, to sleep with the other children and to welcome the company of fellow humans.

Singh was relatively successful in changing Kamala's outward behaviour, getting her walking and housetrained within a couple of years of her capture. But when it came to teaching her to speak, Singh struggled. Just before she died, Amala had been making promising progress towards speech, giving voice to the babbling and cooing noises that mark the first stage in a normal child's learning to talk. With Kamala, progress was much slower but Singh persevered. After three years, Kamala had mastered a small vocabulary of about a dozen words. After several more years, her vocabulary had increased to about 40. This was far more than Itard had managed with Victor (and using far less intensive training methods), but not really much of a victory for Singh. To compare, a normal two-year-old child, at the peak of its language learning, would find it easy to pick up 40 new words in a single week. Also, Kamala's words were only partly-formed and her grammar stilted. The Hindi word for medicine is ashad but Kamala would only pronounce half the word, saying "ud". Likewise, she would say bha for bhat (rice), bil for biral (cat) and tha for thala (plate).

Singh made much of an incident when Kamala was given some dolls to play with and then a box to keep them in. Kamala shut the dolls away and "proudly" told the other children in the orphanage: "Bak-poo-voo." Singh interpreted this utterance as standing for "Baksa-pootool-vootara," — Hindi for "Box-doll-inside." While this broken sentence marks a significant step forward for a girl who was little more than a wolf cub a few years earlier — showing not just a use of language but the first glimmerings of a social awareness - Kamala's speech still fell a long way short of normally-reared children.

The story of Singh and his two wolf-girls broke in the newspapers in 1926. As one London paper noted: "At clubs frequented by big game hunters and explorers it was the chief topic at the lunch table." In fact arguments became so heated about whether the story could be true or not that the next day, the same paper was reporting on a fist fight breaking out between two members of just such a gentleman's club over the story. However, the wolf-girls did not become a topic of debate within the scientific community until two books were published over a decade later, one by Arnold Gesell, the noted Yale University child specialist, and one by Robert Zingg, a Denver anthropologist, both of which were based on the diary kept by the Reverend Singh.

Gesell summed up Kamala's progress, saying that at the age of 16, after nine years in the care of the orphanage, she still had the mind of a three and a half year old. But slow though Kamala's progress was, Gesell felt her story demonstrated just how mentally naked humans are when born and how much we rely on society to shape us. As he put it, human culture operates on the mind as "a large scale moulding matrix, a gigantic conditioning apparatus" without which we would remain at the level of animals. However, while more open-minded than most about the importance of a social mould in forging man's higher mental abilities, Gesell still was wedded to a horticultural view of mental development. He believed that culture "unlocks" our dormant abilities rather than, as the bifold model suggests, that these abilities are grafted on top of the raw material of the animal mind. So, for example, Gesell saw the gradual appearance of smiles and other sociable expressions on Kamala's face as the result of the loosening of rigid muscles rather than thinking that Kamala might have had to learn such emotional signals through contact with her fellow humans. Like Singh, Gesell spoke of Kamala's wolf-like habits as if they were just an overlay of copied behaviours that thinly papered over her true human nature — or as he put it: "motor sets [which] constituted the core of her action-system and affected the organisation of her personality."

Gesell wondered whether, with a few more years, Kamala would have caught up eventually with other normal children or whether the traumas of her early years had left her somehow permanently stunted. The question was never answered because in 1929, Kamala caught typhoid and died. Her last words to Singh's wife — possibly too poignant to be true — were said to have been: "Mama, the little one hurts."